The past few decades have seen a considerable increase in caesarean section rates, which have now reached unprecedented levels. Concerns have been raised about the possibility of medically unnecessary procedures having negative consequences for mothers and infants (WHO, 2015). The aim of this report is to show that a properly implemented hospital-level policy may be a powerful tool for reducing the ...
The past few decades have seen a significant increase in the C-section rates of many developed countries. How much have the rates increased in Italy and Germany, the subjects of your report? We focus primarily on Italy, but we also discuss Germany to some extent—and according to OECD statistics for the year 1990, C-section rates amounted to 15 percent in Germany and approximately 20 percent ...
We examine the consequences of compressing secondary schooling on students’ university enrollment. An unusual education reform in Germany reduced the length of academic high school while simultaneously increasing the instruction hours in the remaining years. Accordingly, students receive the same amount of schooling but over a shorter period of time, constituting an efficiency gain from an individual’s ...
In Germany and many other countries, financial advisors are required by law to assess their clients’ risk preferences in order to help them make informed and appropriate investment decisions. Most institutions that provide financial advice - banks, for instance - carry out this assessment using just one type of risk measure. Financial advisors might ask clients to answer a question about their attitudes ...
On Tuesday, October 25, the 2nd DIW Europe Lecture will be held on “Stability, Equity and Monetary Policy”. The President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, will look at Europe’s economic and financial future: which challenges will Europe and the European Central Bank have to face in the months and years ahead? The event will be streamed live. The DIW Europe Lecture ...
Changes in residual volatility in vector autoregressive (VAR) models can be used for identifying structural shocks in a structural VAR analysis. Testable conditions are given for full identification for the case where the volatility changes can be modelled by a multivariate GARCH process. Formal statistical tests are presented for identification and their small sample properties are investigated via ...
A central question in the empirical monetary policy literature is how do asset prices respond to an unexpected monetary policy shock. We provide empirical evidence on this issue by augmenting the VAR model specification of Uhlig (2005) with the S&P 500 Composite Index, and estimating the model on monthly US data. We use the sign restrictions put forth in Uhlig (2005) as identifying assumptions...
